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Show 433 canvas tipped on its side. "Dead Bishop," he called that one. He had wavered between "Peepstone" and "Seer Stone" for the next one, and had finally settled on "Seer Stone," as less enigmatic, but it had unfortunately gotten typed as "Sere Stone" on the card next to it, and he found it difficult not to explain the mistake to the one or two viewers whom he overheard being puzzled by the name. He would have given his eyeteeth to have had that stone again, not only to be able to work from it but to reassure himself that there had even been such a thing, that he had held it in his hand, that it had contained the things he had seen in it. But on his great-grandmother's death, the little house in Randolph had been emptied of her possessions and occupied by rowdy phosphate miners and later torn down, and the possessions had filtered among the surviving first-generation descendants - Lorin wasn't even in the running-and since he did not know most of his cousins he had no way of tracing where the stone might have ended, if indeed there had been a stone, or a cedar chest containing it. Without the original, or something like it, as a model, he had been forced to use a potato dressed up in fragments of broken mirror from a drugstore compact. The resulting painting was not at all the thing he remembered, but he could not admit to being displeased with it as it hung there on a broad expanse of wall next to the dead bishop. It was prismatic; it consisted of incompatible fragments of objects jammed together, the edge of an inverted tree-lined cliff abutting the cheek and eye of a child's doll, bright coins cut off in mid-shower by a diagonal wedge of desert landscape showing an arm of a saguaro cactus, a drowsing half-moon intersecting a facet containing the chrome grill of an MG. Much the same effect of prismatic surfaces carried over into the ballroom painting, on the adjacent wall, in which trolls could be faintly seen dancing through a haze of colored lights, |
